Students from the 2013 CRWR 260 class speak in front of live tweet stream.

On March 4, this year’s Creative Writing 260 class and I will do a live public Twitter performance poem in Fipke Foyer at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, as part of UBCO’s Celebrate Research Week – events schedule here.

It’s called “Herb Is the Verb”: a digital-social media-sound-text event that meditates on the plant-body-mind interactions we experience in life and language. Tune in at 11 am Pacific Time / 2 pm EST, hashtag #vherbage!

Denver Museum of Nature and Science went digital with the classic Talk To The Plant And See If It Grows experiment. They had the public tweet in their words of encouragement or discouragement to #talktoaplant, and tweets were transformed via software into speech directed at one plant while another was kept in identical, but silent, atmospheric conditions.

This writer from the Hyderabad-based newspaper Deccan Chronicle responds to the Tweet To a Plant project by reminding readers that Dhanvantri, the founder of Ayurvedic practice, used his own body as the instrument by which to tune in to plants:

“Dhanvantri came to know and record the medicinal qualities of most of the plants. He did not have any scientific tools for his research. But he had the most effective tool, the art of meditation, being in absolute silence, pulsating in sync with heart beats of the plants.”

Hey, DMNS, I missed the live plant-cam. Did you publish the results? Did the myth get busted or did the idea that tweeting wasn’t going to make a difference get busted?